Salt Heart and Sea Glass Skin
by feralhand
Summary: The first day Heaven stands empty and Hell has no king, Dean says they're done hunting because no one needs saving more than Sam. (rambling prequel to Wings of the Boy King)(deancas)


There are two men in plaid and denim, two more in suits and ties, sitting together on the greenway behind the food trailer parked off US-24. They fold their wax paper wrappers, pick at their burritos. A paper plate goes flying away.

The morning fog mixes with the spice-scented steam billowing over the half-full cement lot. People on their way into work or school are in too much of a rush to notice anything out of the ordinary, like the mismatched group of men. One young mother, though, slows on her way back to the road. Through the driver's side window, she calls to them, "are you alright? Do you need an ambulance?"

Dean dismisses her concern with a flat wave. "No, we're good." He crumples a paper bag and skips it across the grass toward Crowley. The two of them exchange a guarded look before the pared down demon unravels the bag and starts shoving his bloody napkins into it. It's not easy to do in manacles.

An ambulance rolls onto the shoulder of the road ten minutes later. Cas helps Sam up and all four of them head back to the Impala. Crowley has words with one of the paramedics about his limp, his broken nose and his split lip. He tells them _thank you_ loud enough that Dean hears.

There's a violet tint to everything in the wake of last night, like there is when the pressure drops and the wind starts whirling just before a great storm. The sky is still sore, the earth still recovering from the insult it suffered when the host of Heaven fell. The air has that sort of metallic taste, that chemical smell Dean remembers waking up to, in the hospital, after Alastair nearly killed him, and Cas told him he had to keep the world from ending. _It's too big_, he'd said then, and he is thinking the same thing now. As far as Dean knows, the world drops off into a great, fiery mass angel grave where the sunrise meets the horizon. He buries that thought and fakes a half-smile at half-conscious, full-worried Sam in the passenger's seat.

Black blots of trees race in the rearview mirror but it feels like they're getting nowhere. Dean has driven this way a hundred times, but today the curves in the road come a little too soon, the exits come a little too late. The journey to Lawrence is plastic wrapped, like a memory pulled out of the back of his mind. This route can't be any different than it was when he drove to Stanford to find Sam, or when they went up to Lebanon and the MOL bunker for the first time, but it feels surreal. It feels like the next time they come back this way the asphalt will be crumbling over heaving earth and flood waters, and they'll have to walk or maybe sail if they want to go and stop the end of the world.

When they reach Lawrence, Sam is happy to see Missouri. She doesn't recognize him at first, just sees death pall and wrong aura. She invites them in, anyway, because they need help and she _knows_ she's the only psychic the Winchesters can trust. But she keeps her judgments in her own head, about how all of these men look wrong. Hell is stuck to the underside of their skin. Heaven swings in their eyes. Dean's soul still shines, even though it's tarnished. Sam is more like a bonfire burning down. The other two… Missouri won't look into that darkness.

Dean can't sit still for as long as they're stuck in the suburbs. The little houses and the busy people and mowed lawns and yawning mailboxes—it's like a television set turned on in another room with the volume up. He can't see what it's about but he can't ignore the fact that it's there. There's an itch in his fingers, in his bones, behind his eyes; it's got something to do with a lack of space. When he realizes it's because there's no place around here to build a funeral pyre, he just gets in the Impala and goes.

* * *

There are three men, one unconscious, one taking tea, one at the window, in Missouri's sitting room. Crowley is skimming the pages of an occult text, under the pretense of finding information for Missouri and for Sam, when Cas says aloud, "have you imagined what it would be like if you never reacquired your power?" Cas's sedate stare comes away from the window two beats late and circles the room before landing on Crowley.

Here they are, two non-human things sitting like humans in chairs at tables with tiny, sleepy flowers and tea and cool coffee. And here this is, a discussion they've been having, without words, without recognition, since the first time they climbed into the Impala—about why and when and how they're going to get back what they've lost, because that's the loudest thought in either of their heads. Crowley is a little surprised that he's being asked to acknowledge it, that Cas is the first one to speak about it, that it is happening in a quiet room and without guns being pointed in his direction. He wonders if Cas will tell the boys, wonders if Sam would be… disappointed.

"I imagine I'd be dead or worse," Crowley says, and if he fears this outcome his plainspoken approach doesn't betray it. He isn't bothered, otherwise, to concede to Castiel's assumption that already he is conspiring to regain his absolute demonhood, just as the once-angel is already longing for his stolen Grace. "Hell is coming. Heaven." They haven't told him yet, but Crowley has his suspicions and they're only reinforced by the way Castiel's face falls. "Bit of Purgatory, too. Let's be honest, Cas. Souls are… _nice_, but there's a reason those left standing don't have them."

To Cas, Crowley is a burned man. Beneath his black flakes and smoking heart, he still yearns for the fire. Crowley is organic, tempered, empiric. Cas is not, and all of this talk is solicited advice.

There's an ache that's crept into Castiel's chest, and he can't attribute it to a broken bone or an open wound, although it's just the same. He wants to say, _but the Winchesters_. He can't because of Sam, because of Dean, and then John, Mary, Adam. Winchesters have a habit of fighting until their fists punch holes in the fabric of the universe and they're sucked out into oblivion. They won't be _left_ in the end. So, Castiel says nothing. He bows his head like a mourner, turns back to the window just as the growl of the Impala's engine touches his ears.

Sam rouses when the front door slams. He knows it's Dean because it has to be Dean, and he's just relieved when he's right. His brother says nothing as he shuffles plastic bags and drops foam boxes of takeout breakfasts on the coffee table. Missouri pops into the room a few seconds later and though there's no needs to catch up a psychic on anything, Cas tries. Between all of them, they've only found bits and pieces of information that _might_ start to make a positive impression on Sam's trial-wasted condition. Sam readily assents to Missouri's offer of a session soon and then has to assure her twice that he's up to it, because he doesn't look it. In the lull thereafter, as they arrange themselves and their food, Sam gets more familiar with lying to Dean and says he's feeling a little better.

Breakfast is a slow motion series of snapshots, still life pictures that look tilt-shifted and inauthentic. Missouri criticizes Dean for vulgar language he doesn't use out loud. Sam flips the handle on a pitcher of water around, to be polite, in case the former king of Hell or the former aberrant angel of the Lord are thirsty. Crowley takes the butter packet Cas has resigned himself to staring at and tears it open, passes it back, and smiles to himself like a demon shouldn't, because it's not lost on him or any of them that this doesn't look right.

It's all very temporary. This morning is a drop in an ocean filled with the blood of innocents that were carved on a rack in Hell for ten years, and the darkness of more than a dozen decades in the Cage, and every evil deal made with sons of men at a crossroads over a millennia, and _all of it_ from here and now back to the genesis of creation. Then again, considering their track record, it wouldn't be surprising if the memory of this moment lived on forever. Embarrassing. In its way, not very temporary after all.

Dead center in their colorful lives, here is this gray piece. The first day Heaven stands empty and Hell has no king, Dean says they're done hunting because no one needs saving more than Sam.

The problem is, no one knows how to save Sam. Over the next few months, they spread out their feelers on the hunters' network. They make contact with James Frampton his familiar Portia as the use of magic becomes permissible due to desperation. They talk to Don Stark as well, but all the witches can offer are condolences. When Missouri gives in and says she is making no progress influencing Sam's affliction, the Winchesters return to the Men of Letters bunker. They put Crowley in the dungeon and Kevin stops leaving his room.

Dean doesn't sleep at the bunker. He can't, he'll get up every hour to sit and watch and _make sure_ his little brother's chest is still rising and falling. So he goes, drives the Impala thirty minutes up the highway, pulls off on a dirt road and sleeps behind the wheel. He's haunted by the thought that one day he'll go back and find Sammy dead.

One day in late autumn, five young, radical hunters set on finishing the trials corner Cas just outside of Lebanon. Like everything else, it ends bloody, but it's another first for Castiel, and he's not prepared for the fallout. As an angel, he'd taken life in a surge of light and with the intrinsic endorsement of God's will. As a man, he takes it with a gun, a blade, and it's gruesome. Not so long ago, he'd been ready to command Uriel to smite hundreds in the town where Samhain was eventually raised. Now, watching the life leave just one of man, not to mention the other four, causes him such agony he feels in his heart he'll never suit a soul of his own. He questions the justice in his actions, hears an echo of Dean in his head, and understands in a new way why the brothers refused to let that town be leveled—begins to really understand why Sam and Dean do all that they do.

There's a period of adjustment that follows where everyone sees each other differently. Dean tries out the nickname _Killer_ on Cas but it's a horrible way to cope. It sums up their struggle to figure out who they are to one another, though. When it gets too hard, Dean finally asks like he means it, "what's been going on with you, Cas?"

And Cas talks for a while about never being clean again, talks a lot about Hell. It becomes clear pretty quickly that this conversation isn't going to repair irreparable damage. Cas stops talking, tailors his behavior from then on so Dean won't worry, but his hands continue to reek of bleach.

Of course, Dean worries anyway. Dean is still Dean, after all, but it's become a habit for him to climb into the Impala and drive off without word—and when it rains and it's dark and the music is loud, he'll get lost and find a state a mind he can't achieve through alcohol anymore. He'll come to a few hours over the state line at a red light and do a uey, or a day later in a diner nursing a coffee, but he's alone for longer every day. It's not an alien experience, because although Dean has fought and _fought hard_ to keep those he loves alive and by his side, Dean spent forty years alone. He's not sure anymore if he's trying to get used to the idea of life without Sam, or if he just tolerates the torment of the concept better when he's closer to Hell. Either way, it's starting to look like nothing is going to save his brother, and Dean can't sit and watch Sam spit up all of the blood in his body.

The days when Sam is well enough to sit up come rarer. When the room isn't spinning so badly, he spends time with Charlie and they catalogue the bunker's wealth of knowledge. He tells her everything he knows about the Men of Letters, though it's far from everything, and as much as he remembers about law, and how to kill monsters, and where to get parts for the Impala. He still keeps plenty of secrets, though, like his dreams. When Sam sleeps, he dreams he's falling, and he jerks himself awake every night until the one night he doesn't. He's not sure if he's dead, but he knows the Cage by the ping of the bars, knows the Morning Star by the warmth of his rays.

"It's my fault," the Devil tells Sam in a powerless voice. "If I had been stronger, Castiel would not have been left alone to believe the lie my father told us, that man was worthy of our love."

And Sam doesn't ask the Devil anything, but somehow his own voice is in his ears. "When did this become about love?"

If this is a question he asks in a dream, he is asking it of himself. He knows he isn't dreaming, that this is something else, when the answer comes. "Sam. Nephilim, cupid's bow, his Grace. Love is the key to Heaven."

Heaven makes its last bastion in the Cage. It's rusting, though, and its prisoners are looking pale. The light is weak from the loss of the angels and fading as it did in Zachariah's vision of the future; but it swims freely in the tears streaking Sam's face. He always thought of himself as tainted by Hell and connected forever to that world. Now, the trials, his resonance, the light in his veins all together tie him to this, as well, and here is Lucifer reeling in the line. Sam understands he won't be there when Dean gets back from where ever he's run away to this time. Sam has somewhere else he needs to be, _temporarily_—whatever that means anymore.

* * *

There are two men standing in the road. Dean is done with layers. Castiel still wears the trench coat. The midwinter sun cuts over the pine woods and skips off the Impala where she is parked a little off kilter on the shoulder, still breathing fumes.

"Some days, I think I don't ever want to go home," either speaks—Dean of the bunker and for Sam, Cas of Heaven and for Dean. It's a thought they've lived with, each on their own, for a long while, but sharing it is a revelation.

And so the other replies, "me, too."

Dean takes a walk. Cas locks up the car. They keep a twenty foot distance. No hitchhiking, no phone calls, although Cas answers a text from Charlie, tells her they're okay. Feet aching, ears cold, the long, empty road leads them on for an hour. At the bottom of the hill, town lights mingle with the snowflakes that arrive with the sunset. Dean passes up gas stations without discussion, keeps the same pace all the way to the motel office.

The door thumps closed with a sawdust smell. Dean shuts them in a two bed room, falls back on the door like he can't move any further. He covers his eyes, still can't turn off his thoughts. Often, now, he is marooned with his worries, and at the very moment of his egress, he has visions, dark daydreams, that hit him like crashing, icy ocean waves. He can wonder if it's anything like what Sam went through back in Azazel's days, and then he can hurt because he'll never know what Sam went through, he'll never know what Sam is going through, but it should've been Dean all along.

Dean is drowning, but Cas feels like Icarus. Losing altitude, head on fire. Being around Dean has always felt like falling, and there's always been a sense of urgency he never could understand. If he could do anything, anything, _anything_—but he's not much of a guardian angel. Never was. Always a poor excuse. Piss poor excuse of a man, too, because he startles when Dean's fist cracks the wall. And whether it's because he's human now, or because the self-deprecating disease Dean keeps in his heart is communicable through dependence, Cas blames himself. It comes out all twisted, hoarse, musical at once—Enochian, like this: _I'm sorry_. Or, maybe, panic is like this; and doubt, and envy, love, loss, loathing. Loathing a love who is loving loss. It's complicated.

The two of them are more swallows and twitching fingers than tension. It all flows in, melting with the snow on their shoulders, settling in the carpet like quicksand, and Dean drags through it slow. His fingers are bruised, but while they are pressed against Cas' left temple, they don't hurt. Eyes closed, just his thumb between their leaning foreheads, it's like they don't touch even when they're touching. Cas holds his breath as Dean mumbles, "you know," because his throat is tired of yelling about this, "I don't understand that angel crap."

Dean peeks, wants to see his words sink in, but Cas just looks scared, defiant, miserable. "It's not crap, Dean." All this argument earns Cas is a pat on the cheek, and Dean slips away. And Cas can't bare to stand there, but he does, because he doesn't know what else to do with himself, and he trembles under the weight of _what if_.

"And I know you know." Dean's hand lands on the bed before the rest of him. This is what keeps him from falling through the Earth. He's always bracing himself because the genuine article, Hell itself, is just one nosedive away, and no one's going to save him next time.

But when he squints, when the black-blue sheets against his face blur one half of his sight, Dean can still see his angel in the sharp distortions of the kitchenette lamp and the motes of light in his eyelashes. Wanting that to be real is not about being saved, it's about wanting Cas to try. Going through the motions would be enough, as long as it means _I need you, too_.

If consciousness were so easy to will away, Dean would be gone by now. His worst fear takes shape in the shadows on the backs of his eyelids. It curves around the top of the bunker's front door and hangs down around the bottom of their room of stolen triage equipment. In the middle, there is Sam, pale blue and burnt out with the light of God's trials, and no demon will make another deal with Dean then. So, Dean shudders, feels the ocean, tastes the salt. He probably won't sleep tonight.

"I'm not patronizing you," says the darkness with Castiel's voice. He sounds uneasy, sounds like he doesn't mean anything by it when he comments, "were my brothers here, they'd understand what I mean." He pauses and adds gravely, "but they're not."

Dean turns over, pretends to get comfortable. Lukewarm and barely audible, he reminds, "they fell. They're not dead."

Like he's been waiting, Cas makes the point, "neither is Sam."

And then Dean sees where he's strayed in the storm of his sorrow, and he finds his bearings by the light of the angel on the shore. Of course Cas saves him. Of course they can still save Sam, if Dean will just try. Going through the motions would be enough, as long as he never gives up.

* * *

There is one man standing in the forest. An ice drip rain surrounds him, his fever touching the snowy tree branches. When dawn comes, it runs like wine across the sky, and Sam doesn't wake. With his sleeping eyes he sees what dying men see, and he is not afraid.

"Tessa." His voice isn't what it should be. His mind is elsewhere and his tone drifts in unnatural ways. The syllables separate, the sounds fade. The words he speaks aren't words, they're cracks crawling across the surface of a frozen ocean. If Sam is the water, mankind is the ship at his sea. He sweats their bottled messages, his resilience is their hope, and he waits under a red sky in the morning, like an old god—more demon than divine. A storm is coming and the waves roll their ship toward Hell on Earth, to days where demons run free and there are no angels to watch over anyone. _If I was stronger_, is the thought in his head as he strains to stay upright in spite of vertigo, of blood loss, of a heavy heart. "Tessa, I need you."

She has been with him since the first trial, anticipating the culmination, the sacrifice. Any reaper would do, but Tessa has been touched by the Winchesters and she knows, like she knows the end of all things, that it has to be her. So she follows, a patient wolf to Sam's bleeding lamb. He is magnetic, his body breaking, his spirit resonating, but she can't touch him yet. This keeps her from answering his call.

The sun filters through clouds streaked by cold winds. The progress of the day is measured not by the changing light but by the wear of Sam's voice. His mouth is chapped and tacky when he begins to explain, "I want Death's ring. I need to open the door."

Tessa circles, dragging her wispy rags through the slush and leaf litter. She makes no noise. Suspicious, she puts herself on the far side of a strong tree, like the Earth will protect her from a truth she doesn't want to hear. "Are you truly Sam Winchester?"

His hair curtains across his face as he leans, listening in her direction. His body sighs, relieved, and he crumples on the spot. Is he dying? Is he dead? Tessa peers up the hill on her left side, then to the right, down toward the dry riverbed, looking for a spirit in retreat but the woods are empty. She goes to him, kneels at his side, watches the light of his soul flicker off the walls of his body like a flashlight shining at the end of a dark tunnel. Then he grabs her.

His arm punches through the Veil—_oh, Winchester_—and in his fingers she turns firm and corporeal. The illusion of her body is warm and welcoming. It perfumes the air with the scent of chrysanthemums. This is not her will. A reaper does not have will. In this moment, she understands why the freedom to choose is so important to humans. This is an omen. This is a tree falling in the forest. It doesn't matter what they say next. No one else will ever know.

They open the door.

* * *

There is nobody with the Impala when the police pull up behind her, two days later, where she is still parked on the side of the road. Nothing speaks on behalf of the owner and his companion being spirited away from their motel room by an archangel. The world looks no more different today with the Cage open than it did yesterday with Heaven fallen, and with any luck it will retain this quality in the coming days as the very foundations of creation are tested.

There is a napkin note on the dash under the windshield. In a delicate hand, it reads a piece of the first book of Corinthians.

_If I have faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing._

* * *

_Cross posted from AO3, June 10, 2013_


End file.
